All Night Empires Posts

I’ve decided to donate my thumbs to science
useless as they are, they may find distinction as a novelty,
maybe a conversation starter
Nice thumbs…any phantom pain ?

I’ve never known anyone that collected body parts, or even found them interesting,
or tailored conversations to suit, but who knows what people really desire?
Society used to get much more mileage from parts
Scalps, dried ears pressed in a ledger. Heathen scapulars. Trophies. Or a maybe just a receipt tendered
when all conversation is spent.

My topological undoing will be vaguely different, and may enjoy distinction as a warning to others
Less risk means less interest, and more regret
When the waste is segmented into several joints there is no articulation
but it still speaks when there is nothing left to say

Verbal corrections often take 2 minutes or less
If it cannot be settled by then the fists and boots come out.
Puffy eyes plug up the excuses and all that never was,
swaddled in the footie pajamas of all handed-down error,
a hobbykit monster under the bed, four-bile syncopation and ironic scrolling eyes,
half closed up and half shut down, cold-dried, like it’s naptime even before breakfast

The light is good until it tries to climb out of the divide.
From across the civil dusk, the south side sidewalks shuttering all the lesser clues of the undeclared,
missing, or misplaced in the late afternoon’s dimming shadows, heating arguments,
and boozy recapitulations of the all-time greatest letdowns and fuckups,
cast in a mangle of smiles and madly arcing lies like
a blown coin purse, swimming in some humorless, inexhaustible, assholic, backchecked phlegm that spills out of my mouth
whenever I try to describe the known universe

We’ll stop by on Christmas to see how things are coming. Have you finished the crawlspace insulation under your mobile? How’s our client? Has she come out of the bathroom yet so you can put the new tub in?

Are you still singing in that band? How is everything? How’s the new mustache? How is my mother-in-law adapting to life with no daughter?

I think I want to be a cowboy this summer. Except it’s no longer summer. I saw a charter that takes you to eastern Alberta and you can work with horses and combond with other pale cubicle-dwellers. Maybe while I’m there I can perform some audits on a few cows. That can’t be counted as depreciation, Bessie. Or maybe I’ll become a professional basketball player in Italy, since I am tall and already own my own shoes. The rest can be had cheap. I look great in shorts and tank tops, even those yellow-grey recycled gym hand-me-downs. My other cousin Vinny used to tell me that. He’d say Vince, you are as rare as rockinghorse shit. That’s pretty rare.

I have solid skills in other areas too. The Fundamentals. Catching, Passing- remember when I knocked out Uncle Alice with that can of beer? That was a good throw, eh? Snappy.

I’m bored at work just now, so I’m pretending to write an email to an imaginary cousin. I’m also pretending to be Canadian. Eh, the times we had at the Lake. I learned a little aboot love that summer. Nothing funny, but pretty deep. I’m an excellent explainer. I like the time we went to the store to buy some bottle rockets and you stole 6 packs of Kools. You walked me through that first cigarette. I haven’t learned to not love cigarettes since. But why 6 packs? That’s a fuckload of Kools. The next morning I felt like a survivor of a Naugahyde factory fire. Vinny, you kill me sometimes.

Hey- just had a thought. I’ll start smoking crack. Wouldn’t that just about solve everything? Except I can’t afford it. Maybe I’ll turn to crime. Nothing violent or sleezy. Elegant crime, with drinks before the fistfights. Sporting. Like the guys Bond goes up against. How do you get that job- evil mastermind? Crack probably isn’t the turnkey solution.

I try to be open-minded, but none of this is very popular anymore anyway. I really should strive to have more fashionable daydreams.

My sockets are gagging on both eyes, like horse pills, iron-cored meditation balls passed back and forth,
orbit/orbital, small artless toys unable to grasp the close or impending, the proximal
except those tidy inversions in skull from insecurity to anger
self-growth through anger, or social growth through insecurity

Sourced. I sourced a piece of thin clean cotton batting at the hardware store. It has some sticky vinyl paper on it and I applied it to my sucking chest wound but it was way too small and it ended up embedded in my sinuses.

Price point. Help! I’m looking for some respectful whores at the $10 pricepoint.

Apostrophe s for plural or to modify verbs, e.g. He run’s a company that only employ kid’s- the whole situation in fact is ripe for some hard-hitting blogulism.

[The term ‘Botulism’ comes from the Latin for sausage. ‘Blog’ reminds me of a link. ‘Journalism”s origins in the Latin for ‘daily’ doesn’t fit, but a ‘daily sausage link’ does sound both tasty and terrifying.]

i.e for e.g. Allow me to clarify: we only employ kids , i.e. goats or wethers of unusually small proportion. Even dead, they still need to be able to fit in certain boxes, e.g. ones that fit easily in the overhead compartment, or that can be shipped without bulky fees.

Stunning. Stunning capture. Stunning themes and use of geometry in those images.

[Extra points for capture. And image. That’s a stunning, fuckingly good image you captured.]

{Less points for ‘fuckingly’}

And popping contrast. The contrast in those cat candids really pops!

Brilliant. e.g. Fred#1: Why not just use a sharpened paper clip when you want to edit your eyelid tattoos?

I build mobiles. I dabble in the articulation of lifeless things, not always profitable. Shore birds are on special this month. I’m taking a loss on everything. Yes, taking a huge hit; on the thinly pigmented colors that fade after one summer, on the lidless eyes. On the eye-hook joints, on the whirligig inefficiency. On the discretionary maiming of small birds that get too close. On the predatory preference for brightly colored males. It’s not a blowout so much as Total Inventory Holocaust. I’m taking a huge hit, but there’s the excitement of unconditional ruin. Failure without reservation or limitation- total fucking nonsuccess.

It’s a leap of faith, but inspiration will save me. I’ll be thunderstruck by my own genius. It’ll be difficult to function in the brilliance. All-in-all, a comprehensive gobsmacking. The streets will run purple with the telling of my legend. Observance is compulsory, even the feeble and infirm shall not be excused.

Non-articulation comes in cycles, but the leverage is massive. There is great, patent-able potential in any mobile, as well as in any ignorant thinking. Balance is key, and physical phrasing, as are other notions not conducive to my talents. Still, every client gets a questionnaire. Environment, desired effect, weight, structure, materials (post-consumer, exotic, etc.). Exposure. Propulsion (wind, magnetic, superconducting loop, insect, etc.). How funny to see how little I’ve learned about all of this since I left the flies scurrying all over your inner windows.

I can’t help but think how much easier this would all be if gravity wasn’t dressed in duct tape and plastic bags. Fucking gravity. The ragpicker of physical law. Newton’s anal beads. The thyroid of the known universe. The typing exercise, the individually wrapped cheese. The stage laugh. The bean skin in your teeth. The unrecognizable drip down your inner ass. The dark ‘ that’s just sweat, or…?’ thought. The emergent anal bead now utterly removed from any remembered event. Everything comes full circle, eventually. Even the things you’ve since forgotten. Now it’s all capillary bowl. I still put my pants on one arm at a time, but my hat never comes off.

I have bad teeth. Otherwise I am fine condition. I’m so optimistic in fact that I just bought new boots. Leaving the mall I did a survey and I instantly got FOUR FREE GIFTS: an almost new regulation-sized Barbie™ Princess Styling Head. Excellent toy for the average small girl. The hair is still really clean and yellow though the deep black pores and skin tone can look weird under the porch bug lamp. The other bonuses I got are: a NASCAR™ Needle-point Jewellery Kit. And also a new Troutmaster™ Microwave Extension Cord. So you can move your microwave anywhere in the kitchen, even to the porch windowsill for popcorn during the street fights. Anyway, the boots are size 13 and pinch in the toe. I am actually a really narrow 14 so I may have to return the boots, though I may be able to stretch them out like last time with wedges and lots of steam. I won’t say what the 4th gift is because I need you to like me just for me.

But speaking of gifts, I heard a late night kick on my door and went to look and there you were, all tuckered out after the Logger pride festival. I went out to investigate and it was like God had opened your head like a Pez™ dispenser and filled it with whiskey, ecstasy, and racial slurs, then booted you from Heaven directly onto my porch. You were surrounded by a golden light or pee. I really wanted to talk but you seemed dead. Dead or stuck-up, not sure which since you wouldn’t even react when I hot-waxed my phone number into your luxurious calf hair or poked you with my BBQ tongs. If you happen to see this blog and remember waking up on my porch this morning, please email me if you felt something too like I did. Just tell me what your legs smell like now so I will know it was you and not some impostor. I spent at least 15 minutes rubbing 2-stoke oil on your now completely hairless calves and ankles (oops sorry about the hair, that was was my ex’s phone number). Oh shit I just gave it away. Anyway, the oil was only meant as a little waterproofing because I though it might get cold and I stood at your feet looking at you for so long the pee started to flow back towards you and I was out of Crisco™.

Anyways, I have seen you once before. You were on the number 14 bus, eating Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee™ out of a can. You were using a fork. You got manners, that’s rare these days. You left the can on the floor in back and I spent the rest of the ride watching it roll around the bus until it finally got stuck under the brake pedal near the Goodman Mainline.

Pound: Although I have not yet met her, my wife will occasionally murmur before sleep, not a single voice but many, like the grumblings of a parlor of thieves with less than a pound of rare coins to divide among themselves

Once acquainted with the math they will scheme for life, and this will either move through the closet’s tones, or our children’s bones

Or, not many opposable voices but rather a layer-cake fugue, the musical rumors of all my bored ambitions, annoyed from lack of sleep and all these parasites sipping from their red brimming eyes,

one taste of sleep and they are tone-deaf for life

Outside in the dark yard, a horse reaches for the low fruit between yawns, but the wind lifts it just out of reach

H.D: Apparently, the universal feature of night terrors is inconsolability:

like any self-loathing imagist, wide awake with all available commas already at play in manuals and contracts;

like any bouquet-bound gardenia, forgetful of all true associations, or unsupervised arrangements, with Freud, God, or otherwise

A BBb tuba is about 32′ long and averages 4″ in diameter
Easier to just fill it up rather that calculate, but
A one-foot section can hold roughly a quart – a carton of milk- so I’m guessing a healthy contrabass could hold about 10 gallons of milk
A one-foot section is also the saddest sound I know,
Approximately 29 hertz of ‘Thanks for killing time with a loved one’
Practice is neither popular or noble
all I ask is you vacate high to low, and not hot to cold
Calculate the velocity of your favorite woodwind in the tuba’s voice, and seduce the room
Buffeting cheek, brimming eye, and homorhythm-stuffed robes will keep the better drafts and revisions out
and your bare knee might amplify all the room’s privileged tones.